CRM giant Salesforce.com has made its Salesforce1 platform available for financial services companies. The rollout is apparently the first in a series of financial services Salesforce plans to release, all with the goal of helping companies manage their business in the cloud while leveraging social, mobile, and connected apps.

The main focus of Thursday's release is a lead and referral engine that will enable retail banking institutions to automate the process of identifying prospective clients across interactions with customer service reps, lenders, bank officers, and sales and marketing teams.

The platform scans channels across social, mobile, and web environments to capture and track leads. Salesforce said this gives retail banks a single view of all prospective customers and makes it easier to build 1:1 relationships.

Vivek Kundra, EVP of industries for Salesforce.com, said banks now realize the need to go beyond "four walls and a vault," and noted Salesforce1's ability to break the mold by being anywhere, anytime on any device.

When Salesforce launched Salesforce1 during its Dreamforce conference last November, it framed it as a platform designed to future-proof the company's applications so that down the road, customer relationships could be tethered to the internet of things and wearable computing.

Salesforce formed its Industries division back in April as part of its realignment strategy. Salesforce said that strategy includes building out a team of industry experts, and developing an ecosystem of preferred partners that leverages the Salesforce1 platform to address the major challenges for each sector.